Discovering Imogen: A relatively underrated British composer, Imogen Holst is put centre stage in this brand-new recording on NMC

Discovering Imogen – Imogen Holst: Overture Persephone, Suite in F Allegro assai for strings, Suite for Strings, Variations on ‘Loth to Depart’, What Man is He?, Festival Anthem, On Westhall Hill; BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers, Alice Farnham; NMC Recordings
Reviewed by Tony Cooper, 19 August 2024

A relatively underrated British composer, Imogen Holst is put centre stage in this brand-new recording of her works on the NMC label, Discovering Imogen, by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers conducted by Alice Farnham

Of mixed Swedish, German and Latvian ancestry, Imogen Clare Holst (the only child of composer Gustav Theodore Holst and Isobel née Harrison) was born April 1907, Richmond-upon-Thames, Surrey; died March 1984, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, aged 76. Her family had resided in England since 1802 and musicians for several generations while her father followed the family tradition and studied at the Royal College of Music (Benjamin Britten’s alma mater) where he met Isobel Harrison, who was a member of one of the amateur choirs he conducted. Immediately attracted to her, they married on 22 July 1901. 

Although particularly known for her educational work at Dartington Hall in the 1940s, come the early 1950s Holst became Benjamin Britten’s musical assistant at Aldeburgh. She immediately got down to business helping to arrange the annual Aldeburgh Festival which this year celebrated its 75th edition. During her time at Aldeburgh (from 1956 to 1977) Holst helped to engineer the festival to a position of strength and pre-eminence in British musical life. 

Not only did Holst show precocious talent in composing and performance from a very young age she also wrote biographies of composers as well as several books on the life and works of her distinguished father.  

Imogen Holst teaching (Photo: Walter Rawlings via Imogen Holst website)

Following her formal education at St Paul’s School for Girls, Hammersmith, where her father was Director of Music, she duly enrolled at the Royal College of Music in 1926 where she developed her skills as a conductor while winning several prizes for composing.  

At the RCM, Holst studied composition with Gordon Jacob and George Dyson, harmony and counterpoint with Ralph Vaughan Williams and conducting with William Henry Reed who, incidentally, studied at the Royal Academy of Music. 

Frustratingly, unable to follow her initial ambition to be a pianist or a dancer for health reasons, Holst spent most of the 1930s teaching and working as a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society.  

After serving as an organiser for the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (later becoming Arts Council of Great Britain) at the start of the Second World War, Holst began working at Dartington College in 1942. In her nine years there, she established the organisation as a major centre for music education. 

When giving up her work as Britten’s assistant in 1964 she did so to resume her own compositional career and to concentrate on the preservation of her father’s musical legacy. Sadly, her own music is not widely known. Much of it unpublished and, therefore, unperformed. The first recordings dedicated to her works were issued in 2009 and 2012.  

In fact, Holst could lovingly be described as a ‘part-time composer’ and much of her choral music was written for amateur performance. For long periods in her busy and varied musical life she wrote very little. But in her early years she was among a small  group of young pioneering women composers getting their ‘voice’ heard in what was predominantly a male-dominated environment. She kept good company with the likes of Elizabeth Maconchy and Elisabeth Lutyens. 

Importantly, though, Holst was pivotal in the founding of NMC Recordings with composer Colin Matthews and established the Holst Foundation not long before she died in 1984. Ultimately, she doubly ensured that NMC was set up to continue the Foundation’s support of living composers.  

Therefore, this recording (coinciding with the 35th anniversary celebrations of the NMC label) features a host of world première recordings from Holst thus highlighting the work of one of Britain’s most accomplished (but underrated) composers performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers supremely conducted by Alice Farnham. 

This is what Colin Matthews had to say: ‘This recording of music by Imogen Holst for release by NMC Recordings is most appropriate as without Imogen, known to everyone as ‘Imo’, it probably wouldn’t have happened. She had the foresight to set up the Holst Foundation not long before she died in 1984. The Foundation always intended to support the work of ‘‘living’’ composers and we discussed in detail the possibility of setting up a record label which would do exactly that. 

‘Imo was hopelessly evasive if you asked her about her music. Although I knew she had composed throughout her life it was not until after her death that I discovered quite how extensive her catalogue was – well over 200 works. Many of them were arrangements albeit on a small scale but many substantial pieces, too.  

‘Quite a few of her larger works remain unperformed as if simply set aside while she was preoccupied with her many teaching roles as well as promoting the music of her father. During the 15 years in which she worked as an assistant to Britten she continued to write but less so than in the 1930s and 1940s which include her residencies at Dartington. 

‘A few years ago, NMC took over an existing disc of Imogen Holst’s chamber music (NMC D236) and rather, to one’s surprise, it has become one of our best-sellers.’ 

Hopefully, this new CD, which opens with the orchestral overture Persephone, a 13-minute work, will be a best-seller, too. Written by Holst as a student in 1929, it received its first and only performance in a rehearsal at the RCM conducted by Dr Malcolm Sargent. A lovely, strong-textured piece, it offered an utmost lyrical and tender opening focusing on flutes and strings punctuated and contrasted by intense playing by the cellos thus adding an extra dimension to the overall flavour and texture of the work whilst the full orchestra gathered apace in the final bars bringing this delightful piece to a rousing and triumphant ending.  

Composed in 1962, Variations on ‘‘Loth to Depart’’  (based on a 16th-century tune of the same name as the composition) followed and was written in honour of Mary Ibberson, the retiring Director of the Rural Music Schools’ Association and first performed at the RCM under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. 

A courtly-inspired piece comprising a set of five ‘Variations’ scored for string quartet and double-string orchestra found the strings of the BBC Concert Orchestra, under Alice Farnham, fully alert to Holst’s intelligent and diligent writing while the work overall offered the listener an insight on just how passionate she was as a composer and, indeed, how well she wrote.  

The only piece on the recording to have received a professional performance Suite for String Orchestra, dating from 1943, proved an idiomatic piece of writing for strings and was first performed at London’s Wigmore Hall by the Jacques String Orchestra conducted by the composer. She also wrote a couple of other pieces for this concert coming up with Serenade for flute, viola and bassoon and a setting of Three Psalms (80, 56, 91) for chorus and strings.

At the time of her Wigmore Hall concert Holst was working at Dartington and it was only by a coterie of her close friends that the concert came about. They thought it was high time that her work was heard in London on a professional basis and helped enormously with the financial applications of promoting a concert with Vaughan Williams chipping in for good measure favouring one of his prime students in what, I should imagine, was an illuminating concert and, indeed, an illuminating experience for Holst. 

And an illuminating and interesting piece came along in 1927 when Holst wrote ‘Allegro assai for strings’ highlighting just how talented Holst proved to be early in her career as it was written when still a student at the RCM. A very short work of four minutes, it offers the listener a sprightly and colourful folk-like melody that’s more than pleasing to the ear. 

Holst enjoyed many close friendships that included Captain Kettlewell and his wife who lived at Westhall Hill, a small hamlet close to the beautiful Cotswold town of Burford in Oxfordshire. The couple were leading members of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Mrs Kettle was their first secretary. Therefore, in Holst’s delightful five-minute work On Westhall Hill (written for small orchestra in 1935) the emphasis and setting favour a couple of English folksongs which, unfortunately, are not identifiable. Nonetheless, a dance-like work with woodwind, timpani and percussion complementing the strings manifested itself in a rewarding and pleasant performance. 

The BBC Singers feature in a couple of pieces thereby adding so much radiance, weight and pleasure to the recording overall. Their rendering of What man is he? (c.1940) – the text coming from the Book of Wisdom – is one of Holst’s very few compositions for chorus and orchestra and the BBC Singers were found on top form (are they ever off it?) delivering a brilliant account of such a well-written and thought-provoking piece, receiving its first-ever performance on this recording made in BBC’s Maida Vale Studios. Simply divine!  

And so, too, is Festival Anthem (1946), adapted from Psalm 104, a 15-minute work, praising the Lord in all his wondrous and glorious ways. This was also recorded in the same studio and another work receiving its first-ever performance by the BBC Singers. A fulfilling and profound piece, it was dedicated to Dorothy Elmhirst who with her husband, Leonard, established Dartington as a rural community in 1925. This work impressed me greatly and, I feel, needs to be performed ‘live’ at every available opportunity. 

Although Imogen Holst led a fulfilling, busy and interesting life working as a composer, arranger, conductor, teacher, musicologist and, indeed, festival administrator, she never had the inclination, it seems, to marry. She enjoyed several romantic friendships, though, most notably with the musician, composer, communist poet and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Miles Tomalin, whom she met while studying at St Paul’s. Perhaps this was her husband-to-be? Who knows! A former pupil of Arnold Dolmetsch, Tomalin eventually married Elisabeth ‘Suaja’ Wallach, a German-born British artist and textile designer of Jewish descent, in 1940.  

But Holst attracted a lot of attention for her work from universities and music colleges around the UK. For instance, she was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music in 1966 and awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Essex (1968), Exeter (1969) and Leeds (1983). She was also given honorary membership of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970 and appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1975 New Year Honours List. 

However, the fragility of Holst’s health became apparent shortly after the 1977 Aldeburgh Festival when she became seriously ill with what she described as ‘a coronary angina’. She died at her Aldeburgh home of heart failure on 9 March 1984. Appropriately, her grave lies beside Britten and Pears at SS Peter & Paul Church, Aldeburgh. 

Ursula Vaughan Williams lovingly wrote: ‘Imogen had something of the medieval scholar about her … she was content with few creature comforts as long as there was enough music, enough work, enough books to fill her days. Indeed, she always filled her days, making 24 hours contain what most of us need twice that time to do.’  

The last word, however, goes to Colin Matthews: ‘It has been a great pleasure to pay tribute to Imo with this NMC recording, something which would probably have surprised her but surely also pleased her, too.’ I couldn’t agree more.